Pages

Friday, March 16, 2012

Greg Oden: the career that never was

Greg Oden’s release by the Portland Trail Blazers may be the
final chapter in what has been one of the most hard-luck stories in all of
sports. We have seen athlete’s bodies betray them before like in the case
of Ernie Davis and Lou Gehrig but Oden’s has been a very unusual situation that
may be far from over.

For those of us who remember Greg Oden’s college career as an
Ohio State Buckeye, this has to be a really sad story. Oden with the help of fellow Buckeye and current Memphis Grizzly Mike Conley, led the Buckeyes
all the way to the 2007 NCAA National Championship game before losing to the
Florida Gators.

Although they lost, Oden cemented his standing as the best
individual player in college basketball that year scoring 25 points, grabbing 12
rebounds and blocking four shots in the loss.

In hindsight I guess it is more
significant to note that he played the majority of the season with a protector on his
right wrist because of an injury he suffered in high school. He would still go
on to be the number one overall pick in the draft a couple of months later.

It’s been all downhill from there though. Oden didn’t play the
2007-2008 season after having micro-fracture surgery on his right knee making
the 2008-2009 his actual rookie year.

Then he hurt his foot in his very first NBA game causing him
to miss the first two weeks of the season. He would also miss three more weeks later
that season with a chipped kneecap causing him to play in only 61 games that year.

Oden would play in only 21 games during the 2009-2010 season
before missing the rest of the year with another knee injury.

There was hope that Oden would get to play the 2010-2011
season and finally start to live up to his considerable promise but he would
end up missing the entire season after undergoing another knee surgery right
before the season started.

The Trail Blazers would announce before the start of this
current season that Oden had another setback. They still picked up the option
on his contract in hopes that he would be able to play at some point this
season but as the losses piled up, Portland’s management decided to let go of
the former number one pick.

Still, Oden is only 24 years old so if he can prove at some
point in the future that his knee will be able to hold up then there may be a
team willing to take a chance on him but from the looks of things there may be
a more serious problem with Oden’s knees that may not be curable.

So at this point Oden’s career is essentially over. Sad
because Oden is probably one of the nicest people you will ever meet and no one
who knows him has a bad thing to say about him. And that’s what makes this such
a sad story because you never like to see good people have such bad luck.